Amnesty: Iran quadrupled rate of public executions

NEW YORK 
Iran put to death more than twice as many people in 2011 as it did the year before, Amnesty International said Monday in a new report. The rights group said that the rate of executions in public increased even more dramatically, in an apparent bid to suppress political dissent and promote a climate of fear among those who might defy harsh Iranian law.

"Casting a shadow over all those who fall foul of Iran's unjust justice system is the mounting toll of people sentenced to death and executed," said the 70-page report, released in the run-up to Iran's parliamentary elections on March 2.

"There were around four times as many public executions in 2011 than in 2010, and hundreds of people are believed to have been sentenced to death in the past year," it said. In Iran, prisoners are usually executed by hanging.

The report said the heightened pace of executions "may be a strategy to spread fear among the population and to deter protests. As the repression of dissenters widens, the risk of further death sentences and executions cannot be excluded."

Amnesty's report interprets the increase in public hangings, and an overall crackdown on dissent and freedom of the press - particularly Internet-based communication - as a harsh response to the public protests that erupted after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 re-election.

Calls left at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations seeking comment were not returned by Monday evening.

"Since the 2009 crackdown, the authorities have steadily cranked up repression in law and practice, and tightened their grip on the media," Amnesty said in the report.

The fear even reaches overseas. Earlier this month, the BBC said family members of employees of its Persian language service - which is banned in Iran - had been subjected to harassment, including one who was arrested in January and held in solitary confinement in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. Others had their passports confiscated.

"They have stopped public protests using articles of Iran's Penal Code that make demonstrations, public debate and the formation of groups and associations deemed a threat to 'national security' punishable by long prison sentences or even death," Amnesty said.

The report noted that Iran does not provide official statistics on their use of the death penalty, and said there is credible evidence that many people are put to death in secret.

Amnesty's Iran specialist Elise Auerbach told The Associated Press that there were 50 officially acknowledged public executions in 2011, compared to 14 such executions in 2010.

"In a couple of photographs of hangings, I've seen little boys and girls watching executions," Auerbach told the AP. "It's degrading and demeaning."

The total number of executions reported in Iranian state media, meanwhile, increased from 253 to 600. She said both figures were the minimum known, and stressed that "the true number was quite a bit higher."

Among those on death row in Iran is a former U.S. Marine interpreter arrested while on a trip to visit his Iranian grandmothers.